Android browser is '52 per cent faster than iPhone'

And Javascript improvements 'make no difference'

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A new independent study has found that the Android Chrome browser is 52 per cent faster than the iPhone's native Safari.

Using the Android browser on Gingerbread (2.3) on a Google Nexus S and Safari on iOS 4.3 running on an iPhone 4, web optimisation firm Blaze found that Android loaded websites 52 per cent faster than iOS.

iPhone's Safari managed to load websites faster than Chrome only 16 per cent of the time, leaving Android winning out on 84 per cent of the 1,000 test sites.

16 per cent of the time it works faster all the time

In practice, there's not much between the two OSes' load times – Android's median load time came in at 2.1 seconds, while the iPhone managed 3.25 seconds.

It's also worth noting that Blaze, which undertook the tests, worked on "a fast Wi-Fi connection" at times when network usage was low.

On mobile-optimised websites, there wasn't much between the two browsers; Android was only 3 per cent faster than the iPhone's browser, with average load times for each coming in at around two seconds.

One interesting point that the study threw up was that despite boasting improved Javascript engines, neither iOS 4.3 nor Android 2.3 exhibited significantly better load times than previous versions.

Assumptions

The researchers noted in their study that a lot of their assumptions had been proven wrong, stating:

"We assumed that similar hardware specs and the same WebKit foundation would make iPhone and Android's browsers perform equally. We assumed that a faster JavaScript engine equals a faster browser.

"All of these assumptions have been proven wrong when we actually measured those scenarios."